Fighting word

James Bowman is unimpressed with the locution "bellicist," used by John Lewis Gaddis in a TNR article to refer those who believe war is an inevitable part of the development of mankind.

Did it indeed? That must be why we haven’t had any more wars in the last 60 years, then. Surely, if anything were "shattered" by the A-bombs it ought to have been the utopian delusion, common on the left before the war, that it was only "capitalism" and "imperialism" that made nations go to war with each other. But "capitalism" and "imperialism" were once exactly the same kind of made-up words that "bellicism" now is and, like it, were the product of an intellectual con-trick that has been around for a long time.

About two centuries ago, that is, people who formerly went about the normal human business, familiar from time immemorial, of buying and selling things woke up one morning to find that they had been engaged in something called capitalism all along — and so they have been capitalists ever since. Another century on and those who had assumed that the stronger nations of the world would always dominate and impose their will upon the weaker suddenly discovered that they were imperialists, and imperialists they have remained. Neither buying and selling nor the domination of the weak by the strong have shown any signs of abating in the world, but it has become a kind of intellectual courtesy owed by those who wish not to be given the not-quite respectable labels of "capitalist" or "imperialist" themselves to pretend to take the left at its own valuation as offering measures that promise the real prospect of their doing so.

Now we find that that courtesy has to be extended even further, and that those who formerly supposed their membership in tribe or nation necessarily entailed the duty of striking back when the same was attacked must acknowledge that they are advocates of something with the ugly and obviously discreditable name of "bellicism."